stranger on the ground (i left a trail of dust behind)
by Metronomeblue
Summary: He has dangled her above the fire for two and a half years now, and she has learned to love the flames. Rumbelle, desert AU, darkfic.


Disclaimer: I own nothing, except some of the plot and most of the metaphors.

A/N: I haven't written anything Rumbelle yet, so there's this. I was listening to Owl City, and one line really struck me, so after about four hours, you get this unbeta'd, un spellchecked mass of weirdness.

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He spends a dozen thousand years on tears. He has shed so few in this life, and they fascinate him. He enjoys the feel of them on his fingers, the salt catching on the furrows and ranges of his skin. The fleeting wetness dries beneath the sun, and he feels the need to force more. (He needs someone else to hurt, too.)

So he does.

There is a ball in the inner city on the edge of his lands, young girls squealing with delight and young men trying not to look too hard at their best friends' sisters. Once freshly pressed, but now fetchingly unkempt, their flushed cheeks and bitten lips imply a different sort of activity than that which they have been engaging in. There is one girl in particular, whose dark hair flows long and thick over her shoulders. Her eyes are a deep brown, set sweetly in rich skin as golden as the sand outside these pale walls. (He knows her.)

She refuses to dance.

Her dress is purple, dark like desert skies after a sunset. She sits, catlike, in her throne, watching lazily as her friends are taken to the floor. The boys are afraid to ask her to dance, perhaps because of her confidence, perhaps because of her past denials, perhaps because of the knowing smile she shoots them as they leave the room, averting their eyes and return, flushed and disheveled. (He tries to remember if he was ever so young.)

He watches from above, ethereal and light. She knows he's there, unconciously. She's been running from him too long not to. Her eyelids have been painted, violet like her dress, and when she closes those liquid eyes he traces their shape, fingers coming away dusty purple.

The whole room smells of heat, roses wilting and turning brown as he passes, sand stirring like an adoring pet beneath his feet. He remembers every detail, and laughs as he shifts the oil in a lantern. They don't even notice at first, so engrossed in each other are they.

She sweeps away to the next room, having chosen her prey for the night. He is young, and inexperienced, and adoring, and he trusts her when she tells him to close his eyes. He's a fool, but he doesn't even know it.

There are flower petals scattered over the sand, and he smiles as he hears the sounds from next door. The delicate fragments around him curl up on themselves and flicker into sparks. The lantern he had adjusted earlier slips, just enough to drip a small amount of oil onto the already-flaming flowers.

Her screams are the loudest, and he smiles on as she burns. He turns, and kneels, the flames warming his skin pleasantly as he reaches up to her. Her face is caught between his hands, and he sweeps his thumbs over her eyelids, the tears welling up and falling even as her heart fills with smoke and her eyes turn to cinders under his hands. (He feels powerful, and he likes it.)

His fingers come away dusty purple and ashy grey, and he licks them clean.

He continues on through centuries, and nothing changes. The sun rises every day, as does the heat, shimmering, beguiling like water in the distance. The sun sets every night, bringing a cold that leaves even he burrowing deep into the sand, to where it has hidden away the golden warmth of the sun.

He keeps his lands clear, carving out a castle. It is sand and stone spires, brush and ash and brittle metal. He finds gold, and with it a new obssession. (He remembers ash and dust.)

He burns and burns and burns.

He hears legends form, listens, disguised as a breeze in the sand, as travelers tell stories of a creature that burns, that kills and takes and destroys without mercy or doubt or cause. They call it Rumplestiltskin. They tell tales of gold and spinning wheels and burning women in dusty purple. They don't hear him come, don't notice their fire creeping out from inside it's stone boundaries.

They burn quickly, all muscle and bone and thin, thin skin.

He steals those bones, dry and white and brittle, and turns them to gold. (They sit over his fireplace, jaws wide open and eyes surprised, and he laughs every time he sees them.)

The stories spread, aided mostly by him. Rumplestiltskin. He tests it on his flickering tongue, and decides it's good enough.

He finds more and more bones, and soon his castle is golden all over. His floors are flawless copper sandstone, his ceilings rippling layers of yellow and white and coral and red, supported by rafters of golden rib bones and split down the middle with femurs. (It is gruesome and laughable and it pleases him for a while.)

It is his art.

He is called on for many things, as time goes on and the stories change. They call him Rumplestiltskin, and he lets them. They ask for his help, for a child or True Love or a good harvest. He smiles and shouts nonsense to the sky and takes his price. When the leaves begin to fall and the crops are in season, he leaves them with nothing but sand and an empty field. They call on him for rain, and he gives them a drought. (He enjoys their tears and calls them rain.)

It gets boring and routine, and they don't seem to learn he'll never give them what they want. So he begins asking for a higher price, and when he grants their wishes they hand over their souls with nary a second thought. He smiles, all teeth and charm and gold in his bones. He tucks away souls, keeps them in small weathered-glass jars. They glow golden at night, and the light blinds him. (He pretends he's good and steals their souls and wishes he had one of his own.)

He is selfish, and when souls grow tired he begins to get clever. A couple ask him to give them a child, and he snickers at their misfortunes. They ask him into their home, and he blows sand into every corner. It sticks in their clothes, in their shoes, in their food and water. He smiles, all teeth and charm. The wife trembles under his gaze, and it is not fear she feels.(She is unimportant. He has no interest in her.)

He looks at her, and he remembers a time when he'd smile and play along and burn her when she inevitably turned to another man. He laughs and turns away and sends sand to rest everywhere. It sits between her legs and in the sheets and under the bed. He gives them their child, in the form of a draught and a clear sky, and he feels nothing. (He feels no interest in any woman and his power is not enough anymore and he feels small.)

He spends the next decades in spinning. He steals straw from villages, ignoring calls for help and turning travelers into gold-burnt furniture. He burns villages and castles and commoners and royals. He searches for power over them, but finds only their golden bones.(He is alone, so alone, and he is beginning to notice.)

He hears tales of war, and he ignores them. He is uninclined towards war, always has been. He turns golden thread over and over, weaves carpets and clothing and fabric, turns it into curtains and bedsheets and makes pillows of swan feathers and golden cloth. It is soft in his hands, thin or thick, coarse or fine as he wants it to be. He creates and creates from the bones of those he's destroyed. (He has nothing better to do.)

It is a long war. There have been many deaths, blood soaking deeper into the ground than even the sun can reach, and he feels no shame in taking what is his. The ogres have bones so large he makes whole new wings to his castle. He rejoices for this war, turns blood to molten stone and paves his floors in carnelian and ruby. Their skin he unravels into silken thread, moonstone and silver, woven into new fabric and stored away. Their bones are still white, their muscles still waxy pink. He contemplates this, spends time in these thoughts. (He has time to kill, and a war to do it with.)

He releases the bones from the muscles, twirls the soft flesh into stone roses and sets them all about, swaying gently in the wind as though they were alive. He takes the bones, sets them in the ground like stems and leaves, and what were once fingers and wrists become paper-thin branches, topped with pink roses and set in gilded sand. he grows gardens, locked away tight in caverns, chambers paved with crimson tiles and glass ceilings that seem invisible from without. (He creates and creates and creates and has nobody to impress.)

He tires again of war, waits for another plea for his help. It comes in desperation, which he is long used to, and lost independence, like a dying flower about to fall from it's roost. He waits outside as they lose hope in his comeing, sweeps in as a gust of wind, all dust and sand and smoke. The king stands, and he cannot resist the chance to mock this self-righteous fool, so he sits. He laughs, and smiles, all teeth and charm. (The fool has the power, the king has the crown.)

The man swivels, ridiculous and undignified. He is a bellowing bull decked out in red and gold and brown. The court is quiet, half-scared, half-exasperated. There is a girl behind the king, and by her lovely golden dress, she must be his daughter. If he is a bull, then she is fine china, and his smile is more tootha nd less charm. He skin is pale and fragile as his bones, her dress as golden as his halls. Her hair is red, dark like blood and curling like sand in the wind. He takes it as a sign, and makes his offer. (He wonders if her skin would crack beneath his touch.)

Her father yells, refuses, just as he thought he would, and his smile grows wider. The little china girl refuses to cower, though, and she sweeps forward, silent and unbowed. Her face is pale, and her lips tremble as she speaks, blood-red and stark against her skin.

"I will go with you. Forever."

The words drop like stones from her mouth, and he can almost feel them drop on her father's spine, sees him arch forward as though the weight was too much. He stands, relinquishes the throne as he steals away the princess. His smile is wide, and she reaches out to take his hand. (She doesn't break beneath his fingers.)

He takes her far, takes the girla nd leaves empty golden sand. She is whisked away roughly, his sand scratching against her like thorns and briars. She is silent, and her fingers are like stone in his. He drops her hand once they reach the dining hall. Her mouth drops open, a little ring of shocking red and he has the sudden urge to smear that color, over her eyes and cheekbones, to smash those thin bones and paint her paleness bright. His teeth are sharp in his mouth.(She is beautiful and he wants to know if her skin would be silver or platinum on his loom.)

The hall is long, longer than just about nay other in his castle, and the ceiling is glass, made from the eyes of ogres, and golden bones linked with golden teeth. She is awed but not afraid, and he thinks that maybe this china girl is not so fragile as she seems. He sits at the head of the table, sends her into the other room.

"There's a dress for you, dearie. I do hope it fits."

She looks confused, but she goes, and as she walks the rest of the long hall he flicks his fingers, and a bundle of moostone silk that lies unused in a storeroom becomes a more practical dress than the finery she currently wears. He can hear the rustle of fabric, his keen ears straining in the silence he has become used to. She returns quickly, and when he shoots a glance her way, she need not say a word. It fits perfectly. His eyes graze her hips, her slim waist, her delicate collarbone, her chest. (He imagines his fingers tracing her skeleton, turning it to gold inside of her.)

He rambles on, for all intents and purposes paying intimate attention to the happenings around him. He sends her for tea, asks for her name.

"Ah, Belle." She smiles, a thin and half-hearted appropriation of lips, but it is stunning nontheless. Her spindly fingers are clutching a tray, china tea set laid out impeccably on top.

"Of course," he leers, "a beautiful name." He continues on with his list, and when she appears to lose focus he drops in a quick line about skinnning children for their pelts. He quickly adds that he's kidding, but she drops a teacup anyway, and looking summarily horrified infroms him that there is a chip. Sand stirs outside, and he smiles mockingly, waves it off as being 'only a cup'. She is relieved, and her smile is slightly more heartfelt this time. (He wants to drown her in a mirror, wants to watch her smile turn to panic and then emptiness.)

He really only understands how time passes now that she is here to slow it down. She cleans up the sand from corners he'd forgotten it in, and he thinks it's been five years whenn she comes up to inform him it's been three hours. She calls him Rumplestiltskin. He lets her. She becomes more and more at home in his castle every day, and it's almost comical for him, watching her grimace at the skeletons over the fireplace. (She doesn't ask who they were, and he is glad.)

He believes it is weeks that pass, and she must remind him it is months. Days pass one-by-one, rather than in groups, and he feels himself becoming used to her. She is charming, he finds, moreso than he, and he cannot decide if she is so on accident or by some design of her own. They eat together now, him at the head of the table and her at his left. She is delighted to see him now, more often than not. He wants to think it is because she is lonely, but he was lonely, too, and he never sought out company, so he cannot think why she would seek out her captor rather than her loneliness. Every other of the hundreds of seats are empty, and he wants to ask her if she knows she's sitting on the bones of her kingdom's dead. (He wants to ask if she knows what he is.)

She pulls at the curtains against his windows, golden and heavy with the bones of twenty men. She pulls and pulls, not understanding why they don't move. Eventually she asks if he's nailed them down. He nods seriously, and she sends him a look she wouldn't have dared ten months ago. She asks why, but getting no answer, sighs and turns back to pull harder. He rolls his eyes, and opens his mouth to tell her not to bother, but she lets out a yell and he can feel her fall disturbing the air. He launches himself across the room, catches her in his arms. Their eyes meet, gold and blue like sand and sky. The curtains fall aside, and the bright sunlight washes over them both. It feels clean, light, and it's so wrong that he drops her, sets her on her feet and turns away. (He looked into her eyes and saw wonder there.)

She's in a far wing, airing out cupboards and cabinets and the like, when she find his loom and fabric. She's a curious girl, braver now that she's close to her captor. She opens the closets, examines the beautiful clothing, the shimmering fabric. She asks him why it's there, taking a quick sip of water after, as though realizing she'd crossed an invisible line. He tenses, and the flicker of fear in her eyes makes a part of him smug, satisfied. He shrugs it off, tells her a lie about spare time. (He doesn't want her to be afraid of him, even if he does.)

He lets her have a few of the dresses, and her smile is like brilliant sunshine. It's bright, and clean and feels wrong in a corner of him that's covered in ash and dust and gold. She is at home in his castle, seventeen months after leaving her own. He doesn't want to end that, but he feels weak somehow, for not being angry whenever she cleans his room, or opens his curtains or moves straw from one room to another. Sometimes he still wants to hate her, for her to feel like she's unimportant, small, weak. (He wants her to feel like him.)

He shows her the library when she's been there for two years. She's been sneaking books out of his room when he finishes them, and looking for her one day he finds a squirrel's nest of them under her bed. He lets her think he's angry at her, drags her up a tower she's never been in before. When she sees what he's showing her, she throws her arms around his neck and hugs him tightly. Then she bounces away to enjoy this new treasure. He watches fondly from the door. (He knows she's a weakness, but he was never good at resisting temptation.)

He shows her the garden a few weeks later. The roses are truly one of his best works, every petal curled delicately about it's center, every leaf riddled with a tiny skeleton. She coos about them, bends down to smell them, and he thanks anything he can think of that he made them smell like roses rather than the human flesh they were made from. She asks if she can pick one, and he chooses a red one, deep enough to be black. He offers it to her with a flourish and a bow, and she takes it with a giggle and a curtsey. (He wonders if she even remembers he's a monster.)

It is a hot day when he lets her go. He has dangled her above the fire for two and a half years now, and she has learned to love the flames. He gives her a basket, tells her to go to the village and find him more straw. Her eyebrows raise, and those scarlet lips quirk into a startled frown.

"You trust me enough to think I'll come back?" Her voice is hoarse, and he gives her a wry smile.

"Oh Belle, I don't expect I'll ever see you again."

And he doesn't. He has always known that no matter how tempting the fire, no matter how soft the sand, smooth stone and soft silk would call her away one day. She takes the basket, dons a cloak woven of aquamarine and emerald, and with a regretful glance back, she leaves. He watches her as she walks across the sand, sand still and dead beneath her feet. (He wants her to turn, but she doesn't.)

He spins and spins and spins, gold cutting his fingers until they bleed. He spins in front of the window, thread and string and straw heaping around his feet until he can't see. It lays in hills and valleys, and only a few hours pass until the whole room is filled, with exception to the space he and the spinning wheel occupy. He waves his hand idly, blood dried on his palm and wrist, and he turns back to the wheel only to see her returning. He runs down, hand healing itself in his urge to look unaffected. (She holds all the cards and he knows it.)

He is lounging, kinglike, in his chair at the head of the table when she opens the door. She sweeps in, half-gliding, half-running, and he knows something important is caught on her tongue. She drops the basket, and when she reaches his seat, she nearly trips.

"I came back," she breathes, smile wide and joyful on her face.

"Didn't notice you were gone," he sneers, but she knows better now and sits on his right.

Her eyes are wide, and very very blue. He turns to her, and those red lips part slightly. She leans in, whispering something about how of course he did, could hardly live without her, and he found himself doing the same. Their lips met, and a soft numbness spread through his mouth to his body, and his fingers twitched where they had wrapped themselves at the back of her waist. There was a ripping feeling, like lightning in his chest, and he threw her back. Her eyes were blue, her lips red and gaping, her skin pale and flushed in alternation, her dress silver and gold. (She is everything he's ever made.)

"You liar!" He hisses, throwing her to the ground and stumbling back. She looks agonized, and any affection he has for her rears up in him, but he crushes it down. Sand is blowing around them, and the fire is leaping against the grate. His powers are roiling in him, disturbed and confused, and so very very afraid.

"No, it's True Love! It can break any curse!" And it hits him like a dagger in his heart that she thinks he's a curse.

"Who told you?" He shouts, and she flinches, and hse's not been this afraid of him since she first came here. And he thinks of ash and purple dust and golden bones and thinks, good.

"There was a woman, I just met her in the road, she told me-!" And purple dust is soft on his fingertips and burning roses are beneath his feet and he just snaps. He grabs her by the hair and pulls her down, down, down into the depths of his castle, down where the sun cannot reach, and the sand is soaked with blood. (He is afraid of what she makes him feel, so he feels nothing instead.)

His little china girl spends the night in the dark and the cold, surrounded by the smell of blood and metal, afraid and alone and unloved. He brings her out the next morning, throws her out into the sandstorms and the burning sun and tells he he doesn't need her. He has power and fire and sand, gold and blood, and stone. She stares him down, and she shakes her head, and it is only when she walks away that he realizes how much he'll miss her. (He needs her more than anything, and she knows it.)

It is months more than that, many cycles of sun and moon and bone that she finally visits him. Her eyes are ash and her heart is burned from her chest, and she is suffocating purple and gold. He asks her, a false smile on his lips, if she was the one who told about the cure for curses. She smiles back at him, all tooth and charm.

"Why yes, I met this sweet thing on the road and told her she could have you forever if it was True Love. Such a shame that didn't work out. You may need a new maid, such a tragedy what happened to the last one after she left." His heart speeds up, panicky and aching still.

"Tragedy?" His voice tremors, but he doesn't care. He really doesn't, this time.

"Oh yes. Her father was ever-so-suspicious of your letting her go so easily, and he locked her up. They thought she was under a spell, tried to cleanse her soul." She laughs, and it's like somebody screaming underwater. "She threw herself off the tower."

He freezes, and at first he can't think, can't remember anything. His mind is blank, an abyss of white. He swallows, pulls his threads together in one hand. She laughs again, and he can't think.

"Get out."

She does. She leaves and he turns to a cabinet. It's full of fragile things, china and glass. They remind him of her, and he breaks them. It feels good, feels great, even, to destroy these things. SO he keeps doing it, tosses them at the wall, one by one, until he reaches the teacups. He picks one up, and his finger catches on the chip. He stares at it for a moment, and then, a tear falling crookedly, sets it gently upon the table. (He'd break it a thousand times if it would fix her broken body.)

(He'd give her father any soul he owned, if he'd only leave hers alone.)

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End file.
